Baja California is best known for its sun-drenched beaches, its vast empty spaces and its strange plants.

Few people are aware of its secluded, fog blessed Guadalupe Valley with thousands of acres of vineyards planted in rich soil.

Even fewer know of this desert valley's world class wines and wine makers.

Funding for the Desert Speaks was provided by Desert Program Partners.

Representing concerned viewers making a financial commitment to the education about and preservation of deserts.

And by The Stonewall Foundation.

When most of us think of Mexican beverages, we think of Tequila or Cerveza or even Mescal.

It's only been in the last couple of decades that Mexican wines have come to the attention of connoisseurs.

The very best are produced in the desert of Baja California.

One small inland valley called Guadalupe is the center of production of fine wines.

It's not far from the bustling city of Ensenada.

Historian Bill Beasley has studied Mexico for decades and has just recently begun to study its wines.

The glare is tremendous here.

That's the moisture, the reflection on the ocean, the moisture coming in, which I guess is part of what makes the wine so great here.

That little extra dash of fog and ocean moisture.

It's interesting that that's a characteristic of great wine countries, whether it's Napa or Bordeaux or some of the other French areas or in Italy.

Somehow that night fog, that creeping moist feeling that cools the grapes down, is critical.

From its appearance, the city of Ensenada in Baja California could almost be on the coast of southern France.

It's surrounded by mountains, semi-arid climate and tranquil waters.

There are other similarities as well.

Well, Bill, Ensenada is not just a little sleepy coastal fishing town.

Certainly not, Dave.

We're right here in the zona turística where you can see that not only will we find some wine but there's also beer and pappas and entertainment centers of all kinds.

Seafood.

Music.

We just heard an accordion.

What's better than that, right?

We're going to go in here and check out some of the wines that we're gonna see the vineyards that produced them up in the Guadalupe Valley.

And I'd like you to take a look at this one wine in particular.

Wow, what a selection.

Yeah.

This is from the Adobe Guadalupe.

They're both named for archangels.

Here's the first one and you're gonna love this.

Oh, yeah, with the angel head.

Yeah, okay.

This is like their number two wine and then they're most famous for this one here, also named for another one of the archangels.

And once we get up there, you're gonna see that this is fabulous red wine made at a fabulous place in the Guadalupe Valley.

In Baja California.

Great.

In Baja California.

I'm ready to go.

Okay.

Mexico's the first wine producer in the Americas and in the non-European and Asian world.

About 1500 Felipe Segundo ordered the end of any commercial wine production with the idea that then the Spanish wine producers would have a market in the colonies.

Wine production continued throughout the colonial period for sacramental purposes to use during the communion.

It's funny to think about globalization as a recent process.

Globalization has been going on since the arrival of the Spaniards.

The plants now being used come from California or come from France as shoots.

Some of the techniques come from France or the United States or Spain or Italy or Australia and then they're revised to take advantage of the Mexican climate and Mexican soil and Mexican atmosphere completely.

So it's an international process developed on local conditions.

You have to cut the grapes right where the petiole stem meets the bigger stem or you lose a bunch of em.

So it takes a lot of skill.

And I haven't quite had enough time to develop the finesse that it takes.

Give me a few years.

American ex-patriot Don Miller and his wife Tru produce wine in a small winery in the valley where there are a dozen wineries, most of them small.

The name of our vineyard is the same as our estate, which is Adobe Guadalupe.

And we have about 65 total acres and of which 50 are planted with grapes.

And we have a total of 11 different varieties, all reds.

We decided the varieties to plant based upon what we thought the micro-climate here was.

Even though it's an old industry in Mexico, it's relatively new in terms of commercial wine being sold in Mexico.

And Mexico is a very low consuming population.

The great wines of any place whether it be in Mexico or any location is produced in the field.

And the role of the wine maker is to enhance the flavors of those particular grapes that the vineyard manager has produced to that point.

Es agrónomo.

Okay, so José is an agronomist and his work, working with several different vineyards, is to care for the plants from the time they're put into the ground 'til the time they're producing.

It's a pretty responsible job.

To make good wine you need good quality grapes.

And the principal factor for quality is climate.

This valley has the perfect climate for cultivating grapes for wine making.

The second factor is a certain kind of soil.

And the third thing is what we humans do.

For example, do we want a smaller plant, do we want more bunches, should we trim back the plants, reduce the number of leaves and so forth.

These are not table grapes, they're tiny, the size of currants.

They're actually quite tasty.

They don't taste like a Concord grape, they taste a little bit sweeter.

But the idea for making wine is not to have a big grape with a lot of pulp but apparently to have a bigger skin to pulp ratio and that's what he's got.

Look how small these guys are.

They're almost hardly bigger than wild grapes.

We trim off around 50 percent of the clusters so that the remaining grapes are more concentrated and mature correctly.

So we're using the process in reverse order to get good quality grapes.

[Spanish] Reflectometer.

I've never seen a reflectometer before.

[Spanish] So you're measuring the sugar content with this reflectometer.

Yes.

[Spanish] 28 percent sugar?

Uh huh.

[Spanish] Bricks.

...Bricks.

Yeah, I'm learning a lot here.

Because of the fact that we're a little bit late getting the grapes into the winery, that's why it's a little higher.

We would normally try to pick it around 25.

Right.

So this is Cabernet.

Yes.

And so you, when you blend something else like cabernet franc, you use something with lower sugar.

Correct.

.to reduce the alcoholic content.

Absolutely.

...Absolutely.

When you get higher bricks, you get usually lower acidity.

And we want more acidity in the grapes.

Where do you taste acid, the acidic?

Right when you first get it on the back of your pallet.

Uh huh.

Yeah, you can smell it a little bit when you go through the bouquet.

But the three stages are the bouquet, the back of your pallet and the finish.

But usually you can get the acidity on the back of the pallet.

The acidity gives it more brightness, gives more flavors to the wine.

Also helps in the aging too.

I was raised a strict Methodist.

Yeah, okay, okay.

Wine was wine and it was all the brew of the devil.

Exactly.

All this seems astonishing.

Yours was a Lucifer of the.

That's right.

In general, Mexicans are just now discovering that our national wines are of good quality and there is a resurgence in the demand for good tasting Mexican wines.

The growth of wine production in Baja is going to be limited because we don't have sufficient water.

These soils don't produce as much as they could because of the limited water.

But on the other hand the soil requires fewer fertilizers and herbicides.

It's very interesting that for ten years you've been able to use the unaltered soil.

The soils here in Baja are very rich and precious but limited because of the scarce water resource.

This is just ongoing alternate olive trees and grapevines for, oh, miles now.

We're coming up on Cetto right here.

Ah, there's the billboard, yeah.

Yeah.

And the Cetto family has been here since the 1920's.

In the last three decades they've been extremely prominent in wine industry across Mexico.

I think the Mexican wine industry today is one of the most nationalistic industries in this country.

It's a wonderful example of the way investors who are Mexican or people who have come to Mexico and become Mexican have invested in this country and developed an industry that they hope to sell to a Mexican market.

A wine maker begins with his plants, it's gonna take him three or four years at least before he harvests.

Shortly after that then he's gonna go through the production process that could take up to two years.

So as a minimum, five to seven years.

Wine makers have to be very optimistic about the future.

Because of all the challenges of the Mexican wine industry, you would think many people wouldn't want to do it.

But actually that's what the attraction is.

The fact that it's difficult and challenging, it makes it also all the more rewarding to be able to accomplish a wonderful wine.

In the Guadalupe Valley the person most responsible for production of high quality wines is Hugo Da Costa.

He's an enologist, a scientist in the art of wine making.

He owns his own winery, consults with others and most importantly for him has been instrumental in creating a wine making cooperative.

It's a grass roots effort where townspeople and others can learn to make their own wine.

I hope you can describe what you've created here, this whole facility and maybe take me down to the cave.

Sure.

Yes.

Well, basically the idea is, that was an old building that produced olive oil and olives.

So the only changes that we did was the part of the olive changed to produce wine and the idea is to keep the old building for oil and we start to produce also olive oil.

So we believe then the wine and the olive oil could work together.

That's a good combination.

The grapes are being here since many years with the missionaries but we are really part of the new world wine region and I think it's since in '88 there is a big, big change in terms of the wine is really wine with Baja California personality.

We import those bottles from a winery from California and in this product we are putting in a very low profile the wood.

We think that the vineyards, the old vineyards, should express the grape and not the oak.

So the good thing about this wood and also is you can work in gravity.

So the wine is on the top of the building and just we come here and up above.

So that's completely full.

That's full.

Bueno.

We receive the grapes here and we can crush in those two different levels.

If we really want to have a wine region, we need to have more people involved.

And if those people are part of the community, we'll be much more strong.

They are really the roots of the region so we need to integrate those peoples to this evolution, to this time.

I could just show up here.

Yes.

You have your grapes.

.with my pickup full of grapes.

Exactly.

...Exactly.

Say I want to make some wine.

And you can, at any stage you say, "Well, do you want to bottle it yourself, do you want us to bottle it, do you want us to ferment it, you want us to crush it?"

Or I can do any of those things myself.

Any.

...Any.

Actually you can crush your wine and ferment your wine in your house and you don't have the space to store it, you can bring the wine here and we store it for you.

So as many offshoots as possible.

Do you have crush?

So this is where they do the crushing.

You have everything now here.

Crush, fermenting and press.

So that's the three important parts of the process.

There is an economic movement that you can start to see.

The main thing is try to incorporate this economic movement to the every day, through the towns, to the little towns to the valley.

You know when you make wine, you have fermentation and you have maturation.

Fermentation is sugars become alcohol and maturation is you take all the flavors, all the colors from the skin and seeds.

That maturation is finished so then you need to separate the wine from the skins.

So you do that by pressing, by pressing the skins.

So you can personalize your wine with a wine press.

The more you press, more flavors you have.

I see.

Sometimes could be too much flavors and the wine become rustic.

And so that's very important part of the process.

When you have a year like this, and it's a very, very good, 2004 gonna be something very, very special, you can really press hard your wine and you don't gonna have vegetative flavors.

And the interesting thing is a lot of young people are starting to be close to the wine.

The new approach from people to the wine is people are now more open and they are asking for different things and looking for different things so that's going to give us a very nice opportunity to grow.

Also there's still a problem.

I mean, wine is expensive, you know.

So we need to have people able to buy the wine.

But some of the reason this is not an every day culture is because it's expensive and there's a lot of needs before it goes into wine.

Yes, that's the crushing part.

So they are crushing the grapes.

They're breaking the berries.

You put together the skins and the seeds and the juice.

We have contact with vendors.

They bring his own grapes or you buy or you do whatever is necessary to have grapes.

At what stage are these, what's in here?

It's just after pressing.

You have the wine and it's still fermenting a little bit.

You can see.

When you take out the skins when the flavors are ready.

But that doesn't mean necessarily that the fermentation finished.

So you put your juice to finish here the fermentation and when it's ready, you go to the bottles.

I see.

Well, you can still see the bubbles breaking on the surface.

You can measure the level of sugar that you have in your wines.

So you start for example, that is a Baume scale.

So if you have 14 Baume that means that our juice will be able to produce 14 degree alcohol.

We take the sample from the juice.

When you start, you are like this and then less and less and less and less.

And that's because the alcohol is less dense?

Exactly.

...Exactly.

And so it's a mix between water and alcohol.

Water and alcohol.

Okay.

So we're gonna move to the bar is when the densimeter goes like this.

So when it reaches zero, it's out of here.

Exactly.

And also you check your temperature to be sure that it's not, I mean, should be a little bit of temperature because the wine is fermenting.

Yeah.

That generates heat.

Exactly.

But not too much because if it's too hot, the yeast.

You'll kill the yeast.

Exactly.

I hate it when they kill the yeast.

One could get inebriated eating the grapes in here.

So how many working enologists are there in Mexico?

Well, 15 only.

15 working.

Yeah.

And how many of them are here in.

Most of them.

Most of them.

So this tiny valley really is the center of Mexican.

And gonna be more and more the wine region.

Yes, of course.

I think that over the next ten years the Mexican wine industry is gonna develop as one of those specialty niche markets so that those people who have a real sense of excellent wine will seek it out.

The Mexican wine industry can never become a great bulk wine industry.

It can never challenge Gallo, it can never challenge some of the Australian bulk wine producers.

But it can become an extremely well known and extremely successful premium wine producing industry.

The name is Monte Xanic.

It's Monte Xanic Winery, and we have 100 hectareas.

75 percent are planted.

This is the cave you've been telling us about.

Are we going to visit now?

Took us 18 months.

It's part of a project we started almost two years ago.

It was over three tons of dynamite.

Three tons of dynamite.

That's a good blast.

Yeah, a good blast.

Like 2,300 trucks of rock.

And today you have a cave.

Today we have a cave for 4,000 barrels.

It's an amazing place.

The purpose of the cave is to keep the temperature constant, low temperature.

To be able to store wine and to keep the quality of the wines.

So here you're in really a desert and temperatures get warm outside but it still keeps it cool in here?

Exactly.

Without any refrigeration you can have a 20 degree temperature differential.

The name Xanic.

Wines are very nationalistic really because they form part of whatever the land produce.

Then we looked for a name that was part of Mexico and Xanic is from the Indians, Cora language.

It means the first flower, the blooms after the first rain.

You can look at the wine in this glass and see the structure and that includes the tannins.

What are you looking for exactly, Hans.

In visual examinations you look for color, the deepness of the color and also of the affects that you have on the glass.

This is gonna be related to the alcohol.

The wine is something that you are born with, you know.

And I born in Ensenada and Ensenada is the major wine producing area in Mexico.

And I was in contact with wine since a very early age and I always wanted to be involved with wines.

This is what we call Sir Rafael and this is a blend of syrah and cabernet sauvignon and it's about 20 percent syrah and 80 percent cabernet sauvignon.

And it has flavors of black cherry and varied spiciness.

It goes very well with the Mexican food that is lots of chile.

Oh, it has, the color is fabulous.

So we try to do very heavy extraction so you can see the color is very, very dark.

That makes the wine even more attractive.

Almost seems a shame to drink it, the color is powerful, dark ruby.

Salud.

Compañeros, amigos.

Novios, señoras.

Novios.

Do you make wines that taste good to you or do you make wines that you predict will sell, appeal to other people's taste, or do you want them to be the same?

Well, Louise and I were talking about that earlier but we actually want to make wines that we like.

Good, good.

Rather than wines for the consumer and we hope that certain people.

We hope the consumers like it too.

Certain consumers enjoy the same type of wines that we enjoy because we're producing such a small quantity that, I mean, hopefully somebody will like it.

All of the wineries are, with our exception, are owned by Mexican people.

And, but our winery we consider a Mexican winery because our wine maker and vineyard manager are partners with us in the project.

I've seen a huge number of different aspects of Mexico.

This is new.

...This is new.

Looking out at a place and looking over a vineyard does not fit in with the normal experience I've had in Mexico.

Absolutely.

...Absolutely.

In many ways, northwest Baja California is ideal for wine making.

It has a mild climate, plenty of sunshine and excellent soil.

But it's also a desert and the water that's vital for irrigation is scarce and dwindling.

The challenge for wine producers is going to be to continue to produce high quality grapes, to make their excellent wine, in competition with other water users in a land that is hungry for that vital liquid.

Oh this one kind of gushed out of the bottom of this.

Yeah, it really did.

Because we just crushed these grapes and put the cabernet sauvignon in this tank so it's.

We've got grape juice here?

You've got grape juice and so it's very sugary.

Well, that would meet with my father's approval.

Good.

See you won't have to have the alcohol with it, yet.

That's right.

Oh, it smells completely different than anything else we've tasted.

Smells horrific now.

Yeah.

That's good.

It's even better than Welch's grape juice.

Funding for the Desert Speaks was provided by Desert Program Partners.

Representing concerned viewers making a financial commitment to the education about and preservation of deserts.